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Notes:
* The fan changes its rotational speeds with temperature.
** The noise is absolutely unbearable!
The rotational speeds, air flows and noise levels are as per the manufacturer's data.
It has passed quite a long time (in the computer industry scales :) ) since we issued our previous roundup of coolers. Several new processor models have been released, among them the Pentium4 3.06GHz HyperThreading processor. Yes, clock speeds do go up quite fast, and so does the heat emission. That's why Intel has plans to release a new box-type model of their cooler having the copper base.
Therefore, many models that used to look quite competitive now can't cope with the job of high-quality cooling.
The High, Medium and Low modes were set with the Tt Speed Controller switch
The results are quite evident - coolers with copper radiators do their cooling job better than their brothers made of aluminum. A really remarkable thing is that the Arctic Strom2 cooler proved to be a much better performer as compared with the Titan CW7TB cooler that demonstrated absolutely poor results. The difference was so big that I did repeated tests which confirmed the original conclusion: thanks to its more powerful (and thus more noisier) fan, the aluminum Arctic Strom2 does a better cooling job than the copper Titan CW7TB. That's what using a weak fan on a good radiator may result in :)
Just for experiment I removed the fan from the Tt Volcano 7+ cooler and fitted it on the Titan CW7TB. Here is what I've got:
in the table and graphs this hybrid is dubbed as "Titan mod"
This structure was as noisy as Volcano 7+ (which is natural), but it cooled by 1-2 degrees worse. It's possible that the radiator of the Tt Volcano 7+ does a better job cooling the processor owing to the much thicker base and a slight bend of the fins.
The next stage during the test was cooling the processor overclocked to a higher extent. The FSB was set to 150 MHz and the processor voltage to 1.85V. As a result, the processor was running at 2.7 GHz.
Only coolers having copper radiators were allowed into this test. And considering that the Pentium4 features a thermal protection mechanism, upon completion of the Burn software I started a program for picking the keys to a cipher (or something like that) and was watching the results. The most important thing in the program is that every second it displays information on the number of keys processed. In the nominal mode, the number of processed keys was approximately 1960+-30.
In case of overheat (when I disabled the fan) the thermal protection mechanism came into play, and depending on the cooler installed the performance was gradually going down to 1300 keys/sec, after which I enabled the fan again. As a result, the performance was coming back on track.
Even installation of the Zalman 6500B-Cu monster resulted in performance drop by 100-120 keys/sec. Introducing an additional fan (fitted on the same "foot") didn't help improve the results. And only the replacement of the 92 mm fan with a 120 mm thing allowed cooling the processor to the normal limits.
The same results were demonstrated by Tt Volcano 7+ activated to the full sway. But in testing the Titan CW7TB cooler the temperature did not exceed 61 C thanks to the thermal protection; and the performance dropped down to the ~1500 keys/sec mark.
Therefore, the conclusion is this - to raise the Vcore > 1.8V you've got to provide a very high-quality cooling.
the 120 mm fan is a real monster :), to the left - there is a 92 mm fan, and on the rear wall - a 80 mm fan.
The Zalman 5700D-Cu cooler made a very good showing - no performance drop was observed. And the cooler proved to be a much better performer in a closed case - it was able to outperform even the Zalman 6500B-Cu.
The processor clock speed = 2.52 GHz, the Vcore = 1.725V, the case closed.
So here are the brief findings. Overclocking and cooling the Pentium4 processor is not as easy as it may seem at first glance. There are lots of nuances to be considered.
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